Give Thanks to the Meaties

[the1honeycomb]

vfem we were busy doing the same thing yesterday! I processed 12 birds and a few people plucked them! that was a lot of help 4 were mine and the rest belonged to my friend.

almost made it out without a scratch! Ha I love the home grown birds and I won't buy store bought again!

Good work!!!

 

[dewdropsinwv]

vfem we were busy doing the same thing yesterday! I processed 12 birds and a few people plucked them! that was a lot of help 4 were mine and the rest belonged to my friend.

almost made it out without a scratch! Ha I love the home grown birds and I won't buy store bought again!

Good work!!!

We had deep fried chicken yesterday. It's really good... I'll never buy from the store again either.

 

[the1honeycomb]

Just ordered 25 meaties! hope to share the order with my friend, look forward to keeping the freezer stocked!!

 

[dewdropsinwv]

I hope to keep ours stocked too..... I still have a TON of chicken left.

 

[vfem]

Welcome Dew, way to jump in!

I am so happy to see so many people doing it. It really is an experience everyone should have. Even if you never wanted to do it again, its a great appreciation you didn't have before. You'll never look at the chicken in the meat counter the same again. I do still buy store bought sometimes... but we don't eat anywhere near what we used to as far as meat weekly. They say Americans are eating meat 3x a day, 7 days a week. We probably only eat meat 3-4 times a week total. We eat eggs daily though, sometimes twice. (And now I have an ice cream maker to boot!!!!)

Anyways, We only processed 4. I didn't get the rest of the birds I was trying to split an order with someone and I was going to add 12 to those 4. Didn't happen so I wanted to wait until these were finished before we got more. The plan is try to do 25 birds a year. If I can at least suppliment what we have with BETTER meat, I'd be happy. I don't eat red meat or pork at all, so we'll never go down that road... hubby is entertaining 'rabbit'. I will probably never be able to do those... too fuzzy... I would just cuddle them to death.

I've been sore today, still not fully healed... but I'm able to get some stuff done in the garden, and this showed me I could.

Mary, I wish I could tell you this went quickly for me, but do to my 'condition' I worked very slow and took breaks through out. We drank a few beers and talked, and didn't just work because of how I felt. It took 3 hours from set-up, to processing, to clean up. Last year we did 10 birds, in 2 hours. So I know I was poking.

 

[dewdropsinwv]

Ty vfem! I enjoy this site. Thanks to MontyJ I'll never want to buy chicken at the store again. When I do grocery shopping, I look at the price of meat and want to cry. Wish I had the acerage to have a few pigs. I enjoy having home grown food at the house! I know what it ate and how it was treated.

 

[skeeter9]

Dewdrop, we just got our first pig back from the butcher. Oh my gosh! The meat is soooo much better than what you buy in the stores. We are enjoying the heck out of it.

We really admire anyone who can process chickens. We have had layers for years, but can't bring ourselves to commit to butchering meaties. It just seems like such a lot of work yanking all of those feathers out, etc. We have heard of people just skinning them so they don't have to pluck, but not sure if that's a good idea. After tasting the difference in homegrown pork, would love to do the same with chickens, though.

 

[dewdropsinwv]

MontyJ does the gory stuff! I do the final pinning and washing. Then we both go threw the chickens and decide how we want to freeze them, whole, fryers, or what have you.

 

[bj taylor]

skeeter9 what kind of pig did you have? in hind sight, are you happy with the breed you chose? did you have just the one? did you find them difficult to raise?
we eat a fair amount of pork and I would really like to raise a couple. I have to take it a little slowly though. we're just now raising goats for the first time.

 

[peteyfoozer]

We bought a whiz bang chicken plucker and its the best investment we ever made. We did 30 last year and we have another 30 this year (it would have been more but for the danged owls!)
We used to raise pigs and it was VERY easy. We'd always do at least 2 so they weren't lonesome Just make sure you have a good pen for them because they dig and root. We made a self feeder out of heavy pipe made siure they had some shade and a little muddy spot to play in. They LOVE leftover milk and apples and stuff. I'd love to do some here, but not sure if it would freak out the boss or not.